MGMT - Time to Pretend

"I'm in the prime of my life. Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives."

Album: Oracular Spectacular [debut album]
Recorded:
Genre: Indietronica, Indie Pop
Album Release: October 2nd 2007
Single Release: March 3rd 2008 [lead single]
Length: 4:21
Producer: Dave Fridmann
Vocalist: Andrew VanWyngarden [age 24]
Label: Columbia

Music Video


Live on KCRW


2005 version

Charts, Streams & Sales

Australia (albums): x2 platinum
UK (albums): x2 platinum
USA (albums): x2 platinum
Spotify: Over 450 million
YouTube Music: Over 150 million
Paste Magazine's Top 50 Albums of 2018: #17

Credits

Bass, keyboards [x2], percussion, rhythm guitar [x2], sampler, synthesizer

Details

• It's great being young. Everything's so immediate, so vibrant. The concerns of older people are irrelevant. Middle-age might as well be an eternity away. Of course, deep down, we know the future awaits, with its bad backs and overdue debt payments, which is why the song is titled 'Time to Pretend'. In that frame of mind, today's sun will shine forever, always on green fields with rays outstretched. Magnificent.
  
  The band members, Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser, wrote the song when they were in the last year of university. It was adored on American college campuses, and became an integral part of the university experience for many, selling over two million copies in the US alone.
  
  Really, 'Time to Pretend' was a fantasy about becoming rock stars, but it connected with the party hard or die trying attitude many young people have and became an anthem for them, but the song is deeper than that.
  
  It also acknowledges that "the models will have children, we'll get a divorce" because it's the knowledge of future consequences that, counter-intuitively, drive present destructive behaviour. You'd be forgiven for thinking that knowledge of consequences would deter present ill-behaviour in young people, but all evidence points to the contrary, because taking the weight of responsibility on your own shoulders is a right of passage.
  
  By drinking yourself into oblivion, while knowing the hangover will make you weak at the kness, and doing so anyway, is, strangely, to accept responsibility for your actions, and therefore become a an adult, at least in part. It's about taking control of your own body.

• The fans of the band refer to them as the management.
  
  
• 'Time to Pretend' was originally released as an EP in 2005 on Cantora Records.

Artwork